Purim in Israel with April

My sister is in Israel, a guest of the Swedish Theological Institute where she is studying liturgical music. Part of the program goal is to educate the participants not only about the religious sites of Jerusalem and Israel but also about the Arab-Israelite conflict. 

I sent her a message on Facebook: Did you talk about the origin of the conflict? How the West agreed to the recreation of Israel on Palestinian land? Before that, how the Jews were forced out of that land by foreign conquest? Who has right to the land under our feet? In the Philippines, Christian Filipinos pushed Muslims out of their land leading to the conflict there. But did the Muslims own the land? 

Possession of the land is at the heart of many of the wars fought throughout history. Even if humans did not progress from hunter-gatherers to farmers growing plants and animals, land would still be at the heart of conflict. We need land to live. At the fundamental level we need plants and other animals to get the oxygen and food we need just to maintain the metabolism vital to being alive. When we see that possession extends beyond land but to control, what we call politics when it involves groups of people we call nations and churches, we can see why conflict arises between individuals and peoples.

My conclusion is that if we can be impartial we might see there are no victims or aggressors. It's human nature to covet and think something belongs to them whereas possession is really a legal invention to support the psychology of the self. Possessed of a self we feel, in James Cameron's words, "entitled" to take what we think or feel we need. Laws are useful to mediate conflicting claims. When they work they make physical aggression unnecessary. Laws arise from rules we learn about human nature. If we understand how rules come about, we can legislate more wisely. But if we understand human nature, we won't need rules to live peacefully We're all aggressors when we don't understand the nature of the self.

April and her colleagues are going out to eat. It's Purim in Jerusalem and everybody is out celebrating, based on the account of the rescue of the Jewish people from slaughter as recorded in the Book of Esther. Our religions, literature, art, even culture itself documents the problem we have co-existing with each other on an increasingly small planet.

Posted via email from Duende Culture

Purim in Israel with April

Did you talk about the origin of the conflict? How the West agreed to the recreation of Israel on Palestinian land? Before that, how the Jews were forced out of that land by foreign conquest? Who has right to the land under our feet? In the Philippines, Christian Filipinos pushed Muslims out of their land leading to the conflict there. But did the Muslims own the land? My conclusion is that if we can be impartial we might see there are no victims or aggressors. It's human nature to covet and think something belongs to them whereas possession is really a legal invention to support psychology. We're all aggressors when we don't understand the nature of the self. Visiting Spain I understood why the Spanish came to the Philippines. Our human story has lessons for us all to learn if we can get over the bias of belief.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Blu-Ray Players Adds Astonishing Connectivity to Our Post-modern Lives

Blu-ray technology is changing how we view video content. Despite what naysayers proclaimed initially that entertainment delivered by disk was going to be completely supplanted by Internet-streamed content, the Blu-Ray Disk player appears to be staying around and may even become part of the future way content producers deliver products to consumers. The introduction of BD Live, an implementation of Java on the disk, is why.
The process from science to consumer production has taken taken ten years. The first of prototype implementation of blue laser technology was unveiled in October 2000. The project was officially labeled Blu-ray in February 2002. Sony shipped the first BD-ROM players in June 2006. HD DVD had beaten it to the market by a few months. I bought an HD DVD player later that year. Blu-ray players were vastly more expensive then.

I gave in and bought a Samsung BD player in late 2007. A year later newer BDs were unplayable. I managed to upgrade the firmware despite Samsung's awful support for Macintosh users and that allowed me to view most of the new releases but BD Live that began appearing on BDs were beyond the capacity of my player.

This week I decided to try the new LG BD player with built-in WiFi. The alternative was to buy a cheaper player without WiFi, just so I can watch the new releases without crashing my player. I bought the cheaper model with just 1 G built-in memory. I brought it home thinking I would probably have to exchange it for a cheaper, non-Wifi-capable device. Unlike the Ethernet-connectable Samsung, connecting the LG player to the Internet was instant. Whew! But when I tried to check for upgrades, the player once again crashed. I tried BD-Live on some disks I already owned. "BD Live content is available only on some players," the dialogue said. I was going to return the player yesterday when I discovered the problem. I needed to plug in more memory.

I had an old Cruzer USB flash-memory unit that I used at one time to transport files home from my computer at the office. I plugged this to the LG player and everything worked! I plugged a Windows-formatted USB hard drive with 80 gigs and that worked, too. Now I could download additional content from BD Live sites like Warner and Lionsgate.
Bonus View and BD Live, implementation of Sun Microsystems's Java platform, changes the whole entertainment experience. Right now I need a BD Live disk in the player to access additional content like live weather and news reports but the technology has turned my large-screen HDTV into an Internet device! Non-HD streaming content is still unviewable (I require crisp resolution on my screen or great audio or not I would not watch the video) but downloaded HD content is absolutely thrilling to watch. And download is fast!

I decided to learn content-creation software because of my interest in media. After all, I tell people I left the Philippines to access media that were few and far between in the 1970s. Mass media connect people and disconnected was what I felt back then. Pundits warn against over involvement in virtual connections and they may have a point. Nerds are antisocial humans but with their narrow focus they have brought profound insights into our modern world.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

A Temple in Turkey Older than Civilization

"Standing on a hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins." Patrick Symmes's article in the March 1, 2010 issue of Newsweek tells of a find in southeastern Turkey that suggests that 11,500 years ago hunters-gatherers in the last Stone Age built and used temples on a potbellied hill (in Turkish, Göbekli Tepe) before humans turned to farming, then utilitarian pottery, cities, kings, and much later, writing and art.

One of the most influential books that I read when I was just discovering the excitement of books was an ancient cloth-bound book on Greek gods and goddesses illustrated with black-and-white photographs of statues culled from Europe's art and archeological museums. I was fascinated by stories of the origin of things I was learning then through the lenses of science and history, even more fascinated with how people before my time thought about themselves, their lives and the forces that created and shaped both. My interest turned to the culture beyond the native one I saw around me and forty years later turned me into a tourist in Europe.

Our theories about the past will keep changing as we add knowledge to what media and the Internet have transformed into a truly communal store. Long after I am gone people like me will continue to wonder how the commonplace articles surrounding us came to be. More than these solid shapes and manipulable objects I am intrigued by what women and men thought and felt in centuries before mine. Artifacts dug up from the past thrill me with the magnificent possibility that people long dead, most forgotten, were essentially not unlike me. They elaborated theories about how the world operated, why this, what that, and while hiking the wilds of speculation built monuments memorializing their insight, allowing them to enter other aspects of human experience: the sense of the sublime, beauty, and awe.

"Religion now appears so early in civilized life that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it," writes Symmes. In our modern (some say, post-modern) world we cut up the universe into manageable pieces, calling this piece religion, that piece history, this art, that philosophy. Post Aristotle and the classical Athenians we speak of the many "-logies"—mythology, theology, archeology, biology etc. They all fascinate me. 

I have few original insights but they are mine so constitute the composite self that is my ultimate obsession. Teachers of writing say: write about what you know. Few may agree with me but whatever we speak or write about is ultimately self. I enjoy reading what someone else adds to my words and images but writing for me is first of all self-archeology. It is archeology and rocket science. Putting thoughts and feelings into words is exploring the last frontier: my world. 

In Duende Culture I want to write about those aspects of my world we call culture and history, our stories about where we've come from, about the origin and evolution of self.

Posted via email from Duende Culture

A Temple in Turkey Older than Civilization

"Standing on a hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins." Patrick Symmes's article in the March 1, 2010 issue of Newsweek tells of a find in southeastern Turkey that suggests that 11,500 years ago hunters-gatherers in the last Stone Age built and used temples on a potbellied hill (in Turkish, Göbekli Tepe) before humans turned to farming, then utilitarian pottery, cities, kings, and much later, writing and art.

One of the most influential books that I read when I was just discovering the excitement of books was an ancient cloth-bound book on Greek gods and goddesses illustrated with black-and-white photographs of statues culled from Europe's art and archeological museums. I was fascinated by stories of the origin of things I was learning then through the lenses of science and history, even more fascinated with how people before my time thought about themselves, their lives and the forces that created and shaped both. My interest turned to the culture beyond the native one I saw around me and forty years later turned me into a tourist in Europe.

Our theories about the past will keep changing as we add knowledge to what media and the Internet have transformed into a truly communal store. Long after I am gone people like me will continue to wonder how the commonplace articles surrounding us came to be. More than these solid shapes and manipulable objects I am intrigued by what women and men thought and felt in centuries before mine. Artifacts dug up from the past thrill me with the magnificent possibility that people long dead, most forgotten, were essentially not unlike me. They elaborated theories about how the world operated, why this, what that, and while hiking the wilds of speculation built monuments memorializing their insight, allowing them to enter other aspects of human experience: the sense of the sublime, beauty, and awe.

"Religion now appears so early in civilized life that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it," writes Symmes. In our modern (some say, post-modern) world we cut up the universe into manageable pieces, calling this piece religion, that piece history, this art, that philosophy. Post Aristotle and the classical Athenians we speak of the many "-logies"—mythology, theology, archeology, biology etc. They all fascinate me. 

I have few original insights but they are mine so constitute the composite self that is my ultimate obsession. Teachers of writing say: write about what you know. Few may agree with me but whatever we speak or write about is ultimately self. I enjoy reading what someone else adds to my words and images but writing for me is first of all self-archeology. It is archeology and rocket science. Putting thoughts and feelings into words is exploring the last frontier: my world. 

In Duende Culture I want to write about those aspects of my world we call culture and history, our stories about where we've come from, about the origin and evolution of self.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Khaled Hosseini describes writing Kite Runner

Street Scene, Downtown Iloilo

Khaled Hosseini describes his first novel, Kite Runner, as a "slowstarter." Sales were small initially but by word of mouth they grew to make the book an international bestseller -1.25 million copies two years later in 2005. Even before the manuscript was published by Riverhead, NY, it had already been optioned by Dreamworks and the producers who with Mark Foster created what Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called "...a magnificent film."

I want to write a fictionalized account of life in the Philippines when I was growing up and Kite Runner is an obvious model of what can be done.

In an interview done for Amazon Wire to solicit pre-orders for his second book. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled described the writing of both books. He went back to Afghanistan in March 2003, 27 years after he left it as an eleven-year-old boy. This was three months before his book, Kite Runner, was published by Riverhead. He had written the novel based on his memories and book and online research. His editor at Riverhead asked him if he was in Kabul to research his next book. Khaled said at the time he was there just to experience the country he had not seen in all that time. When he did start to write his second book, what he saw and heard on that trip did serve as inspiration.

Khaled tells the interviewer he doesn't structure his novels consciously. He does not plan his novels beforehand. He has a starting point and takes it from there. He does not write for an audience nor write to educate non-Afghans of Afghan history and culture:

"It's a very self-centered act, the act of writing. I write for myself; I'm the audience. I tell myself stories and hope other people would love it as well. But in terms of culture and history of Afghanistan, those things, I try to use just what I need for the purposes of the narrative... It's never been my intention to explain or translate or be an ambassador for Afghan culture or things Afghan... That's too big of a burden for someone who writes novels to be an ambassador for a whole culture. I want  to tell a story and since my story necessitates cultural, historical, and other aspects, I'll use those but that's the main reason for writing.

Posted via email from Duende Arts

Amazon's Book Video Preview

Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic, published last February 9, is available on Amazon. How it is listed brought on this meditation on books and publishing.

Amazon offers the book for 42% of its hardcover price. The listing makes note the book is bound with "deckle edge" paper and explains what this means: the pages are bound to resemble handmade paper by fraying the edges so they appear uneven. Amazon, with Wal-Mart, the most successful merchandising gambit of recent times, sells its products at a sharp discount and with free shipping. Not even Wal-Mart can beat that, especially since for the 49 states, sales don't include sales tax. With its very modern stocking, listing and distribution system, Amazon emphasizes how the publisher (Nan A. Talese) produced the book with a touch of the handmade craftsmanship of a bygone era.

I was struck the most by one element on Amazon's list page for the book. I clicked on a video icon and was treated to what I presume was the author reading from the book against a background that suggested its setting. Amazon, always on the cutting edge to keep its merchandising dominance, may be pioneering another merchandising tool. There really is no question that videos have arrived. With the ease with which video producers today create videos the format should inundate the media even more.

To someone like me fascinated by both words and moving images, the future is thrilling.

Posted via email from Duende Arts